The REVER app: what it costs, what it loses, and an alternative

Updated September 15, 2026 · 6 min read · By Aivars Meijers

What the REVER app is

REVER is a motorcycle GPS and ride-tracking app: it records your route, plans rides, and shares them with a community. The free tier covers basic tracking; the Pro subscription adds offline maps, route planning features, and more detailed ride data. It is a good app when it works. This page is for the moment it does not: a ride that vanished, a subscription you want to stop paying for, or a wish to keep your riding history somewhere that does not depend on an account.

The most common reason riders leave REVER is not the routing. It is opening the app after a long day and finding the ride gone. If that is you, the thing to check in any replacement is where the ride lives while you are riding. RiderLog writes to your phone first, and to your own iCloud when that is on, so a dead battery or a dead cell signal costs you nothing. It does not put a signup wall in front of the map, and it does not send notifications to keep you engaged. It does not navigate.

A recorder that writes to the phone

RiderLog saves the ride on your device as it happens, recovers it if the phone dies mid trip, and keeps your history yours. Its own servers only hold what you choose to share.

Free to download. Your rides stay on your phone.

Why did REVER lose my ride?

I cannot tell you what happened inside someone else's app, but the failure mode riders describe is consistent enough to name. The ride is being held somewhere other than the phone's own storage until you press save, and then the save needs a working connection, a stable app process, and a phone that is still switched on. Take any one of those away at the wrong moment and there is nothing on disk to fall back on. "Didn't save my ride!" is a common review title, and several riders describe the same sequence: the app spins, something went wrong, and the day is gone. Long days in thin coverage are exactly when this bites, which is also when the ride was worth keeping.

The practical lesson for choosing a replacement is narrow and useful: ask where the track is written while you are moving. A recorder that appends to local storage as it goes has something to recover from. A recorder that assembles the whole thing at the end has one chance to get it right. I wrote a longer walkthrough of the three ways a ride disappears, and what to check before you give up on one, in my motorcycle app lost my ride.

What RiderLog does with your rides

Rides are saved on your phone, and when iCloud is on, in your own private iCloud storage, so they move to your next phone without you doing anything. If the phone dies mid trip, RiderLog recovers the ride instead of losing it. RiderLog's own servers only hold what you choose to share: a ride you post to friends, a check-in, a list, a place you added to the map. Nothing else leaves the device.

I am not going to tell you it can never fail. Every app in this category once believed it was stable, and I have no crash free rate to quote at you. What I can tell you is the architecture, which is the only thing worth judging before you have used it for a season: local first, recoverable, exportable as GPX from the ride detail view whenever you want it somewhere else.

The signup wall and the notifications

Two smaller complaints come up often enough in REVER's low reviews to be worth addressing directly, because they are cheap for me to be different about. The first is being asked to register before you can see anything: "Require signup before showing the map" is the shape of it. RiderLog uses Apple sign-in, no forms, and it never imports your contacts or friends list. The second is push. Analytics in RiderLog never include routes, ride names, notes or photos, and you can switch them off in Settings. Privacy Zones hide your home automatically, you choose what appears on a ride card and who sees each list and check-in, and you can delete your account and every piece of cloud data with it from inside the app.

Will it drain my battery the way REVER did?

"Unusable due to inefficient battery usage" is a fair summary of a whole cluster of reviews, and it is worth understanding why it happens rather than taking anyone's word that their app is better. Two things cost real power on a ride: a lit screen, and a network connection working hard. A navigation app has both, permanently, because it is drawing a map and streaming tiles. A recorder with the screen locked in your pocket is writing location points and little else. RiderLog is built for that second case: record, lock, ride, low battery impact even on all day rides. The honest advice that applies whatever app you use is to start the day at full charge and stop looking at the phone, because checking the screen at every stop is a surprising share of the drain.

Does RiderLog have live friend tracking like REVER?

No. There is no live location broadcast, and I would not want you to plan a safety routine around RiderLog. If someone at home follows your dot on a map so they know you got there, iPhone's own Find My already does that, it is free, it works whether or not a riding app is running, and it does not stop when an app crashes. Set it up there. There is also no crash detection in RiderLog, on purpose: a feature that has to work on the worst day of your life should not be a side feature of a tracking app, and the reviews of apps that do promise it include riders describing crashes where the alert never fired.

What RiderLog does socially is smaller and link shaped. You can see the places friends share, their lists and their passport of everywhere they have checked in. You can share a list with a link that opens on riderlog.app with the places on a map, no app needed on the other end. Weekly challenges and ranks let you push each other without turning a commute into a speed leaderboard.

Coverage is thin outside Bangkok

Worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out. The empty feed complaint is real across this whole category: riders open a social riding app, search their state or county, and find nothing. That is not a bug, it is what a crowd sourced feed looks like outside a handful of dense regions. RiderLog is building its places map from check-ins rather than uploads, and the deepest coverage by far is Bangkok, where I live and ride, with a public worked example of 180 places on this site. Everywhere else you will be adding places as much as finding them, and search plus a tap on the map makes that quick. The parts that work on day one with zero other users are the recording, the ride log, the cards, the passport, the scratch map, and a shared list you send to the two friends you actually ride with.

What I would keep REVER for

If the map overlays are the reason you opened it, or you ride in a group that has already standardised on it, switching costs you more than it saves. Nothing stops you running both for a season. Export your rides as GPX first either way, because a history you cannot move is a history you are renting. The GPX guide covers the file side, and RiderLog imports GPX from Profile so an old archive can land somewhere useful.